Apple will no longer report sales numbers

For as long as anyone can remember, every three months, Apple has told the world how many iPhone, iPads and Mac computers it has sold. It's been one of the standards the company has used to show how popular its products remain.

But from now on, Apple will keep those numbers to itself.

Apple shares fell nearly 7 percent Friday as Wall Street evaluated the company's announcement that beginning with its December business quarter, it would no longer give updates on the number of iPhones, iPads and Macs it sells each quarter. Apple made the disclosure in a conference call Thursday to discuss its fiscal fourth-quarter results.

Apple Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri said the company's decision to change that aspect of its reporting structure was based on the company facing new realities with its major business lines.

"A unit of sale is less relevant for us today than it was in the past, given our breadth of our portfolio and the wider sales price dispersion within any given product line," Maestri said.

Dan Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities, called Apple's decision to no longer give iPhone sales numbers "a tough pill to swallow.

"The transparency of the Cupertino story takes a major dent given that tracking iPhone units has become habitual to any investor that has closely followed the Apple story for the last decade plus," Ives said.

The decision to stop reporting unit sales of the iPhone, in particular, was viewed by many Apple analysts as evidence that the company knows that while sales of iPhones are flattening, and may decline, Apple believes it can make up for such a scenario with higher average selling prices.

Evidence of that could be seen in Apple's fourth-quarter results. The company reported that it sold 46.89 million iPhones during the quarter, just 0.5 percent higher than the 46.68 million iPhones during the comparable period a year ago.